


Burn It Out

by Skyler



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra, Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: For Want of a Nail, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-06
Updated: 2016-04-06
Packaged: 2018-05-31 08:54:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6463846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skyler/pseuds/Skyler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Korra finds herself in the Fire Nation rather than the Earth Kingdom at the opening of Book 4.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Burn It Out

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HenryMercury](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HenryMercury/gifts).



 

Korra heals the last of her burns with a grimace and without the aid of the smeared, cracked mirror in the dingy bathroom. Seeing the specter there with bright white eyes and limbs enwreathed in chains hurts worse than botching her healing by not being able to see what she’s doing. One of her eyes twitches from the soot kicked up in the arena, but she’s too drained to try and do anything about it. Tears will work it out in the night better than she can. Instead, she finishes up with the burn on her ankle, rolls down her pants leg, and limps out of the grimy little back room, set on finding a quiet alley to pass out in.

The universe, as it happens, has other ideas, as she discovers when something nips at her sore leg. She swears loudly and backs away, wondering how hard she had been hit when she sees a small blue dragon hatchling on the ground. Its tiny fangs are bared, and it snaps at her once again when she runs out of space to back up. “Hey, cut it out!”

Kicking a baby dragon seems like a supremely unwise idea, even for an Avatar. If she can even call herself that anymore, losing simple fights and waking up every morning in a cold sweat, chased out of her dreams by phantoms, hardly seems to accord her that title. She nudges it away instead, but it sinks its teeth through her boot and sends a sharp shock of pain through her foot. Little beads of red spot through the leather. “You little—”

Bad idea or not, Korra winds her leg back, but the hatchling darts toward another street before she can even throw a proper kick. She grimaces and starts the opposite way, holding tight to the strap of her bag, but her leg suffers another bite before she can take more than three steps.

“What do you want?” she asks, shaking. The hatchling stares up at her and dislodges its fangs from her skin but keeps its grip on her pants, tugging insistently. “You want me to go this way?”

The shadowy mirror of herself blocking her original path is more than enough motivation. “All right, fine. Not like I have anywhere to be.”

She follows the squeaking hatchling down to the next street, where no one else seems to notice it. Maybe she’s still seeing things, Korra thinks. A dragon, no matter how small, should be attracting at least some attention when only a handful exist as it is. More than once she stumbles and nearly loses her footing when she makes the mistake of looking down the town’s darkened alleys and sees heavy platinum chains screaming toward her.

A forest with a rather poor reputation shrouds the town’s western limits, but the hatchling seems to take no mind of that as it hops over deadfall and around the gnarled shrubs jutting up through the dirt. The tip of Korra’s boot catches in a root, and she quickly becomes accustomed to the unique taste of Fire Nation mud as the hatchling squawks at her to continue. Well, at least the soot is working its way out. Hot, bitter tears fall as the little screeching noises gradually fade away. She doesn’t care. She doesn’t care if the forest opens up and swallows her whole, at least then the next Avatar might not be such an abject failure. She doesn’t care about the approaching footfalls or the feeling of being dragged over the ground.

Just as well, Korra thinks. Maybe a forest spirit is carrying her off to throw into the Fog of Lost Souls for intruding on its domain. Maybe it’s a plain old human, taking her for some baser purpose. Or maybe it’s her own dark reflection, chained at the wrist and ankle, ready to pull her into the pool of poison that never seems far behind her. Shining, shimmering death ready to envelop her, forcing its way into her skin despite whatever resistance she can muster, leaving agony in every nerve and muscle, making her head spin, making her see things—

It stops.

At what point it stops, Korra can’t say. The hard _thud_ of her head on the ground replaces the dragging, and she can hear more gentle squawking interspersed with light footsteps heading away from her. She rubs her temple and sits up slowly, taking in her surroundings once her eyes adjust to the low, flickering light.

She’s in some kind of cave, most likely near the back of it if the winding path stretching out of sight is any indication. The only light comes from torches with their holders hammered right into the stone, set at regular intervals to minimize the amount of shadow.

For a cave, it’s remarkably well-appointed. All the dust and detritus Korra might have expected to see on the floor of such a space is absent, carefully swept away. Although the dimensions are too rough and natural to have ever seen work by an earthbender, it hadn’t stopped someone from slowly hammering several nails into solid stone to hang a deep crimson tapestry inlaid with gold fabric. It’s something she would’ve expected to see in a palace, not a little hidey-hole on one of the outlying islands.

There are a few pieces of roughly carved wooden furniture dotting the space, and at the back of the cave is a simple tatami mat where a woman facing away from her sits in front of a row of candles, alternately stoking and quenching their flames in time with the rise and fall her breath. The hatchling is perched on her shoulder, its tail swishing across the back of her spotless tunic.

“So you _are_ alive. I wasn’t looking forward to dragging you back out to the wolves.”

Korra ignites a bit of flame in her palm to get a better look at the woman. Her white hair is pulled back in a severe, somewhat antiquated style of topknot, and when she turns her head Korra sees sharp amber eyes that seem to lend themselves to a kind of resting haughtiness. There are a handful of wrinkles around her eyes, but otherwise her age is having no appreciable effect. Korra gets to her unsteady feet. “I…I know who you are.”

The sides of Azula’s mouth stretch slightly, into the faintest of smiles. “You’d better.”

⁂

Something tells Korra it’s morning, although the lighting is all the same in the back of the cave regardless of the time. The smell of freshly steamed rice is probably the best sign she’ll get. She hisses in pain when she tries to move her neck, made badly sore by a night on the ground without any kind of support, and Azula only spares a passing glance at her as she sits up. “I can’t seem to get away from Avatars, can I?”

“ _Your_ dragon brought me here,” Korra retorts, putting a hand over her rumbling stomach.

Azula points to a pile of little trinkets the hatchling is using as a bed. “Ryu does have a bad habit of bringing home useless things.”

“What?”

Korra gets up too fast, and the intimidating swath of flame she tries to call up fizzles into a few pathetic embers. Azula quenches them easily before grabbing her by the wrist and shoving her back to the ground. A bruise on the back of her leg screams in protest, and through her haze she sees not Azula, but herself, her old self, white-hot fury glowing in her eyes. She whimpers and backs away as fast as her injuries will allow, hands threading up in her hair as she tries to shake her head clear. _It’s not real it’s not real it’s not real—_

“Useless,” Azula says again. “I’m eighty-eight and put you down without a second thought, and as much as I’d like to say it’s because I have some small experience fighting Avatars, it isn’t. How do you think you’re going to deal with that tyrant running roughshod all over the Earth Kingdom if you can’t even fight me?”

She says nothing as Azula takes a few more bites of her rice. “Maybe you shouldn’t. She’s been doing your job for the past three years and doing it better than you ever did, from what I hear. If some upjumped peasant—” Azula actually sneers at the word— “can do things better than the divinely appointed guardian of the world, then what good are you?”

There’s no good response Korra can think of as she draws her knees up under her chin. It’s a question she’s asked herself many times before, and she never finds an answer. No one can argue with what Kuvira had accomplished, Korra least of all. Every news story of another province stabilized that reached the South Pole had made her heart clench, only serving to remind her that someone else had taken on what should have been her responsibility while she was struggling to take more than a few steps at a time.

“Get up.”

A training tunic falls in front of her, and Korra doesn’t stand quickly enough for her host’s liking. Azula hooks her hands under Korra’s arms and pulls her to her feet. “What is this?”

“I don’t care for wallowing, Avatar. And I…I know what being at your lowest feels like,” she says in a quiet voice, her hands slowly balling into fists. A small and calculated shred of vulnerability shines through Azula’s otherwise flawless façade. “I have enough things keeping me up every night when I try to sleep, I don’t want to have to see them when I look at you, too. Now put that on and get your sorry self outside.”

Azula’s training is a swift and brutal battery, made all the more acute by the empty stomach Korra has to work on. She considered sneaking a bit of the rice, but Azula seems the type to know exactly how much she has left at all times. It’s a moot point, since by midday she’s losing whatever she had left in her stomach after taking a hard palm to the gut in a spar.

Ryu casts an impassive gaze from high up in a nearby tree as Azula waits for her to finish retching. If the burn in her throat isn’t enough, fresh and bloodied bruises all over her body sharpen every movement to an almost unbearable degree. She doesn’t cry, but only from fear of provoking more pain. “On your feet,” Azula barks, a ball of blue fire in her hand. She kicks Korra’s side, hard enough to hurt but not hard enough to disable her. Enough to let her know she’s falling behind.

“I can’t do this on an empty stomach,” Korra says from the ground, still on all fours.

Rather than a rebuke, Azula nods and disappears into her cave. Korra waits before counting her blessings, but a wave of relief crests over her when Azula returns with a bowl of rice and sets it on a table near the cave’s entrance. It beggars belief that she enjoys something so domestic as sitting outside with her meals and enjoying what little sun breaks through the forest’s canopy, but Korra isn’t about to complain about not having to go all the way inside. She struggles to get up and stagger over, and she’s almost to the table when a bolt of lightning flies from Azula’s fingertips and blows the bowl into a thousand pieces, scattering rice for dozens of feet around them.

“You can eat when you do something worthwhile.”

All Korra can see is a sickening redness as she lunges at the old woman, but rather than finding herself on the ground again, a strong hand clamps around her throat. The little hairs on the back of her neck stand on end from the passive charge surrounding Azula. “Did that make you angry, Avatar?” she asks as her brow knits up in some kind of recognition. Her hand loosens the smallest bit so Korra can suck in a mouthful of air. “Well?”

“Yes…”

“Good.” Korra finds herself in the mud again, gasping for breath. “Use that. Be angry, be furious. You’re going to need it for what I have to teach you. The White Lotus should’ve taught you how to lightningbend, spirits know almost every other firebender can do it now.”

“How do you know they didn’t?”

“I can feel it,” Azula says, letting sparks leap from her fingertips. “The way your chi focuses—doesn’t focus, rather. It’s a useless blob right now. Not entirely unlike yourself at the moment.”

Korra grimaces.

“Once you can sharpen your chi to a razor point—don’t give me that look, you’re the Avatar, it’s possible—then you can lightningbend. No earthbender or metalbender would be able to stand against that. Now get up and stand behind me.”

Having something to try for, something to look forward to, is more filling than any meal. Korra shakes off her bruises and stands a good distance behind Azula as she takes up a low stance.

“It comes in through the stomach,” she says, shifting her weight from leg to leg, alternately extending and pulling in her arms. An energetic hum fills the air, and Korra can feel a charge growing under her skin. “Through the fire chakra, right here. You need perfect clarity of purpose when you sharpen your thoughts, and—”

A bright blue bolt springs from her fingertips, arcing through the air before striking a fallen tree. The bark splinters instantly and the rest of the tree follows shortly after, bursting out from its core and peppering them both with shards of wood. Azula straightens up and dusts herself off.

“And good aim.”

⁂

“Again.”

Wiping the sweat from her brow, Korra takes up her lightningbending stance again. It’s plenty warm in the Fire Nation already, and all she seems to be able to do is generate a lot of heat to add to it. Her shoulders ache terribly from imitating the forms Azula showed her, but all she has to show for her effort is the sore need of a shower.

“What am I doing wrong?” she asks. “This is exactly the way you showed me.”

Azula doesn’t bother getting up from the stump she’s made into her throne. “You’re thinking too much,” she says simply, leaving a trail of sparks in the air wherever she moves her finger. “If you took two minutes to remember how your little band of malcontents kept outpacing you, you’d know it was because they wanted one thing, they had one thought, and they pursued it relentlessly. Equality for the bloodbender playing at revolutionary, spirits for your uncle, freedom for the airbender and his band of martyrs. Order for Little Miss Chin-come-again, I suppose. It all boils down to the same thing, though. Power. That’s all they ever wanted. And the only thing that let you beat them was that you were stronger. Use that. Don’t let any other thoughts in. They don’t matter, anyway.”

Stronger. It’s a foreign thought in Korra’s mind of late. Two years confined to a wheelchair, stripped of her dignity and everything that made her valuable to the world did little to bolster her confidence. Stronger doesn’t ache from getting up in the morning, she thinks. Stronger doesn’t jump at shadows. The Avatar certainly doesn’t, and yet it’s a mantle she has to carry for life, no matter what twists and plunges that life might take. There’s been progress, of course, but she can see her broken body all too clearly whenever she closes her eyes. Her helplessness.

“I don’t know that I am anymore,” she admits, carefully picking her words. Korra knows by now not to expect any measure of sympathy from her strange bedfellow, but opening up too much is just as likely to earn her a palm to the gut as a smart remark, neither of which Azula ever seems to have in short supply.

“No, probably not. Not right now, certainly. But it doesn’t matter. You’re the Avatar, and you _will_ be, even if it kills you and I have to go find the next one to train.”

“How often do you actually think about killing me?” Korra asks, unsure of what kind of answer she would prefer. Azula scoffs.

“If I wanted to kill you, I would have done it already. Start again.”

Low stance. Deep breath. Balance and counterbalance. She draws one arm in and puts the other out.

⁂

“You can metalbend, can’t you?”

Korra looks up from the pitifully small bit of rice she’s been given, but doesn’t answer for a moment. It’s rare for Azula to say anything beyond an order or a mocking remark, even after two weeks of grudging hospitality. Two weeks of not being able to call up anything but sparks. Mako can lightningbend, she thinks, and regret hits her. She should have learned. “A little. My lessons got interrupted.”

“Then why are you running around with so much quicksilver in you?”

“What?”

She’s gotten quite used to Azula rolling her eyes, but this is the most dramatic time yet. “The poison, you stupid girl, the poison! I can feel it crackling every time you try to bend lightning. I thought you weren’t able to get it out, but now I think you’re just holding onto it because you’re afraid.”

Her fists ache as they crash into the rough surface of the table. “I’m not afraid of anything!”

“You’re a terrible liar. You’re terrified, and I know why. I see her, too.”

Azula jerks her head toward the entrance of the cave, where Korra can see herself out of the corner of her eye. Her old self, her ruined self, stands swinging the chain wrapped tight around her wrist. The eyes that haunt Korra’s restless dreams every night follow her in mute appeal, and she feels a bead of cold sweat trickle down the side of her neck. Azula sees something rather different but no less real to her, a younger princess with badly shorn hair, mouth locked in a rictus smile as lightning crackles around her hands.

“Don’t pretend with me, it’s a waste of my time and yours. Now get that stuff out of you. Bend it or burn it, but it’ll kill you slowly if you don’t. Unless that’s what you want,” she says, measuring her words. “I’ve killed one Avatar already, if you’d rather have a quick death. Granted, it didn’t take, but I can make sure this time.”

The casual death threats have long since stopped rattling Korra, but she still rises to the almost pitying taunt in Azula’s voice. She knows how to look for metal through the ground, but turning that sense inward requires another level of precision entirely. Azula watches in silent, feigned disinterest as she takes up a stance somewhere between earthbending and waterbending and searches for the metal in her body.

Small clumps, she feels, all over her body. The realization that she’s been carrying the Red Lotus’s parting shot for three years is almost enough to make her sick. Korra grasps for the poison, but the pain in trying to hold onto it and draw it out is as bad as it was going in. It makes her head spin and sets her muscles to ache, and she slumps to one knee before her body can give out from underneath her.

“I hope you’re a better firebender than metalbender,” Azula says, hauling Korra back to her feet. “Burn it out.”

It’s easier to find the little pockets of quicksilver the second time, easier to feel them bubbling as heat surges inside her. The pain returns, cogence sloshing in the boiling sea of her mind, and every bone feels ready to splinter and burst under her skin. What she can remember of her captivity and poisoning doesn’t seem far removed, but now she doesn’t have the numbness the Avatar state can provide. Her jaw clenches and grinds to help her ride it out, and more than one tooth chips under the strain.

An idea strikes her, but she worries that if she stops to think about it she’ll never get started again. She lowers her stance and rocks back and forth from foot to foot, guiding the poison through her body by extending and pulling in her arms. Azula cocks an eyebrow, but says nothing as Korra starts to crack under the strain, throat burning, fingertips singed by wild sparks, ready to cough up thick silvered blood. Everything sharpens into a single thought, _out_. _Out_. _Out_. _OUT—_

She screams as she thrusts her hand forward once more and the poison comes oozing out from under her wrist, followed instantly by a crackle of white lightning that brings the whole cave into dazzling focus. Good aim, Azula had said, and Korra already has the perfect target. She flicks her wrist, and the next bolt goes flying into the specter skulking at the entrance to the cave, only now Korra’s eyes are the white ones, and all her reflection can do is take the hit before bursting into countless red lotus petals, swept quickly out of sight.

There’s little time to enjoy it before she sinks to all fours, spitting up blood from her raw, aching throat. It’s red, blessedly red, and contrasts deeply with the little puddle of silver that she traps in a rock. “I’ll take that,” Azula says, snatching it up before Korra can protest or wonder what she might want it for. “Very good, Avatar.”

The erstwhile princess’s hospitality doesn’t extend very far beyond Korra’s recovery, though without the metal weighing her down she can hardly wait to get back out into the wider world. “I…I don’t know what to say, Azula. Thank y—”

“What are you doing? I’m not hugging you.”

A nod and wolfish half-smile suffice for Korra. She shoulders her bag and turns toward the mouth of the cave, but she turns back and sees her host idly spinning the quicksilver-laden rock across her table. “Why did you do all this?” Korra asks, chancing a familiarity neither of them really feel. “The real reason, not just because your dragon bit me until I followed her.”

Ryu cracks one eye and looks up at Korra from her perch. Azula shrugs.

“Maybe I’m getting soft in my old age,” she lies. “Maybe I wanted to teach _someone_ proper lightningbending, not whatever bastard form of it the rest of the world is doing. Or maybe—” Her eyes glass over slightly, and her thoughts drift very far away as she continues— “Maybe it’s because I know that conquerors don’t stop until they’re stopped. And that girl might style herself an empress, but she’s just another Chin. Better-looking, maybe, but still a conqueror. Call it mutual self-interest. You needed help, I needed not to wonder if her little empire won’t come marching to our doorstep, demanding blood for old wounds.”

Korra nods slowly, seeing around the corner of her words. Azula turns one hand palm-up and lets a few blue sparks catch into small flame. “Not until they’re stopped. If you feel any hesitation, burn it out. Sympathy, mercy, any of it—it’s poison, and all it’ll do is hold you back. Burn it out. Now go on, get out of here.”

She watches the Avatar leave without another word, disappearing around a bend in the passage. Her own specter watches with folded arms, smirking, sneering, and then flickers out like a dying ember. She breathes a little easier.

⁂

Azula can’t help but grin, maybe in spite of herself, when she reads the newspaper Ryu brings back for her little pile of trash. Such a shame how the nascent Earth Empire ended, she thinks before laughing at the pretentious name. Right outside the gates of Zaofu, where Kuvira’s little insurrection began, facing down the Avatar for the city’s sovereignty. So insistent on having all the trappings of power without understanding the burden of it. All that metal she wore must’ve been terribly conductive. Practically a lightning rod. “More’s the pity,” she says, and takes a sip of her tea. Bitter.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! You may also enjoy my other stories:
> 
> [No Gods, No Masters](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3721117) \- What if the Red Lotus managed to kidnap an infant Korra? (Finished!)  
> [Kyoshi: Swan Song](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5248682) \- Avatar Kyoshi recounts her life to Korra. (In Progress!)  
> [Izumi Week 2016](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6553468) \- Prompts for the best Fire Lord ever.  
> [Prompt Madness](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5181146) \- All the drabble prompts I get on [my tumblr](http://fell-dragon-domain.tumblr.com/) in one simple document.


End file.
